Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

Textures spell the difference between superb-looking models and crappy-looking ones. Excellent diffuse and normal maps are crucial in giving your models that wow factor, and bad ones can damn even the best models to ruination. Normal maps can be baked from high-poly models, a process that I explained in a previous blog post . Diffuse maps, on the other hand, are created in image-editing software. There are many ways to make diffuse maps. For instance, you may copy and paste images together to form your diffuse map, as I explained in another blog post . Things get more complicated if your diffuse map has to follow the bumps and crevasses of your normal map. Such is the case with the snake and hydra texture, in which the scales on the diffuse map have to match those on the normal map. The key to accomplishing this is to use your model’s normal map – or better yet, its height map if it has one – as a basis for painting its diffuse map. There are many ways to do this. The method that...

I just spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to reduce the contrast in the red channel of my snake’s normal map. The problem was that some scales were darker than others, but I wanted them to be shaded more or less the same. Here's how the red channel of my normal map originally looked. The picture below shows what happens when the scales are not uniformly shaded. Notice that the neck is darker than the rest of the body and that there are some vertical patches of dark scales going from the neck to the middle of the snake. In addition, the lower part of the body is plunged abruptly, not gradually, into shadow. All this can be corrected by balancing the contrast among the scales. I’m sure there is more than one way to do this in Photoshop, but the method I came across is fast and reasonably effective. If I had known how to do this from the get go, I would have saved myself several hours of frustration. Before I forget my hard-earned knowledge, I’ve doc...